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'Final Gift' film gives purpose to victims of crime

Published: Friday, February 8, 2013 at 9:58 p.m.

Last Modified: Friday, February 8, 2013 at 9:58 p.m.

A few weeks after Thérèse Bartholomew's 33-year-old brother was shot to death following an argument outside a strip club in Greenville, S.C., on Feb. 12, 2003, the mother of two and high school English teacher decided to forgive his killer.

“It was after the murder, in the courtroom,” she said. “The need to forgive him created a conflict within me because I felt like forgiving him was a betrayal of my brother. I had to let go of thinking I would get anything from his killer. I wanted peace so I could move on.”

Steve Leone's death left the now 45-year-old Charlotte woman in a state of despair. She decided to leave her job to pursue a master's degree in criminology at the University of North Carolina Charlotte.

She also set out to meet the person responsible for her brother's death – and to put that meeting on film.

“I was trying to get a master's degree to understand on a larger scale what people were capable of, why this happened, and why crime happens so often. It became my way of understanding why people responded to crime in the ways that they do,” Bartholomew said. “That feeling that I was betraying my brother is where the idea for the film came from. One of its strengths is that it shows that victims have different needs. There's not a hierarchy of victims – one person's reaction isn't more important than another's.”

Now, nearly nine years after her brother was shot to death, Bartholomew presented her family's story and her research into victim-offender mediation on Friday to a group of criminal justice students during a screening of her film “The Final Gift” at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

The film, which was completed in early 2012, was produced by Bartholomew and her husband, Doug, and has been shown at universities, crime symposiums and other criminal justice educational events.

Friday's event was sponsored by the Sociology and Criminology Department's student club.

The 74-minute documentary, which was sculpted from nearly 300 hours of footage and took seven years to complete, is comprised of interviews with Bartholomew's family members, including her and Leone's parents, Richard and Betty, and their children, and Bartholomew's video diaries.

Bartholomew says she didn't interview any of her family members herself for fear of influencing their testimony.

“In my mind, the film needed to be very balanced. I didn't want a ‘Lifetime' ending,” she said.

As with other cases in which restorative justice methods have been used, Bartholomew's family members reacted in different ways to her desire to speak with Leone's killer.

The documentary culminates with Bartholomew's meeting Karl Staton, the man who killed Leone, in December 2010 at Kershaw Correctional Institution in South Carolina.

It was the first such meeting to take place in a South Carolina prison since the 1980s, Bartholomew said.

Mediation sessions similar to Bartholomew's meeting with Staton can play a part in “restorative justice,” a concept that seeks to repair the harm done by crime to victims and the community, helps victims get answers to questions they may have, and strives for offenders to make amends for what they've done.

It also allows victims, who often feel shut out of the prosecutorial process, a way to be heard and participate.

“One of the reasons it's surged up in the West is because victims have not been satisfied with the current system,” Bartholomew said.

In New Hanover County, the only similar program involves juvenile mediation through juvenile court, according to Kimberly J. Cook, chair of UNCW's sociology and criminology department.

Cook, who studied restorative justice in Australia on a Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship in 2001, said she's an advocate for expanding the county's use of similar programs.

Kenneth Barnhill, who manages the mediation program, said Friday that most of the cases have involved fights between two juveniles.

“Although I cannot speak specifically to how the victims ultimately feel, I believe that it (mediation) certainly gives them a chance to be heard,” Barnhill said in an email on Friday. “They can be heard in the court system as well, but it is a little different when you sit down face to face than in a court room.”

Since Bartholomew met with Staton in 2010, one other victim in South Carolina has requested a similar meeting.

In North Carolina, restorative justice programs are scarce, she said.

“In North Carolina, we don't have a system set up to do these types of dialogues in the adult justice system,” Bartholomew said. “The dialogue doesn't influence anything. It's post conviction and post sentencing, so there's no reason not to do it. This is something people should care about.”

For Bartholomew, the process was about forgiveness.

“People hear the term ‘restorative justice' and they think we want to open up the prison gates and let all the offenders out,” she told audience members at the screening. “It's not about forgiveness. But there is space for it. It comes up in the film and it's a controversial thing. Forgiveness was always about me. It was what I owned and what I claimed, and to me, that's pretty powerful.”